


You Struck the Match (And Now I Can’t Control the Fire)

by ShadowsLament



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-05-05 09:55:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14615845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: The team is sent Stateside to thwart an organization intent on stealing and selling works of art to fund various criminal operations. The mission reveals pressure points that both Illya and Napoleon are reluctant to exploit.





	1. Chapter 1

“Do not get ideas, Cowboy.”

Napoleon did not flinch or move. The lack of reaction was not unexpected. Had Illya’s words carried a texture, had his syllables been raised strokes, like paint on canvas, Napoleon could have reached out. Touched. If for no other reason than to spite Illya’s sudden, close proximity, Napoleon would have remained as still as the limestone Elders observing the wide corridor at their back.

Illya glanced at the long shadow of Napoleon’s lashes, weighed the man’s continued quiet. He lifted one shoulder in a loose, baited shrug. “Regardless,” he said, “is too big for you to take.”

That, at least, provoked a sound. One that would have been recognized as a snort had it been produced by any other man. A man who did not wear elegance like a smooth, supple skin. Someone who—

Illya huffed, “We are to—”

“Safeguard the artwork. Yes,” Napoleon said absently, his gaze fastened, still, to the oil painting anchored to the wall a scant five feet ahead, “I’m well aware of our role here.”

Students choked the courtyard, chattering like a charm of finches. Individual conversations were muffled by the bowed stalks of numerous chimney bellflowers, by the tiled wall of the cloister. All but drowned out by each of Illya’s tight exhalations.

“If so,” Illya quietly muttered, “you should not look at it like you would have it above you in bed.”

Napoleon’s mouth opened but offered nothing. The angle of his lips shifted, slowly, unfurling a grin sharp enough to cut a deep dimple into the sculpture of his cheek. “There are only so many expressions worthy of something so—”

“Remarkable.” The woman who had interjected was sheathed in a slim-cut dress that ceased at the knee. A gray so cold it would shame the frozen current of the Ob River, the lustrous fabric mirrored the shade of her eyes, if not, Illya noted, the stare she slanted up at Napoleon. “Isn’t it?”

“In myriad ways,” Napoleon agreed, his quicksilver lips shifting once more, catching on a smile that took its cue from flames and wicks, and devoured as it burned. He held out a hand, palm open to embrace the woman’s trim fingers, to bring the unblemished slope of her knuckles up to his mouth. “El Jaleo does not stand alone in beauty.”

The woman responded by taking an inexorable step closer, as though Napoleon’s voice was not a matter of air and vibration but of silk and soft knots at both wrists. She hummed, hungry, and Illya’s hand skittered over the lens of the Instamatic swaying across his chest.

Those glacial eyes drifted from Napoleon’s mouth to the cleft in his chin, eased down the impeccable line of his closed jacket to the pressed placket of his slacks. Another ridiculous, ravenous hum, then: “No, it does not.”

The camera’s body cracked and split with a strident snicker.

It was nearly imperceptible, Napoleon’s sigh, as he turned fully towards the woman. “Tell me, if you would, is this—”

With the broad reach of Napoleon’s shoulders providing ample cover, Illya hastily jerked up on the leather strap that had scraped and bit into his nape for the better part of two hours. He shoved the useless piece of equipment into his coat pocket, managed a deep breath, another, and tuned back into the conversation playing out at his elbow.

“And you, Mr...”

“Rafferty,” Napoleon supplied, “but from your lips, Noah.”

“Noah,” she repeated, and Illya realized, as he had not before, when Napoleon had first supplied to him and Gaby both the needlessly intricate details of his alias’ backstory, one for each and every button he secured as he spoke, that the name he’d chosen had much in common with a low moan, a hitched breath in the aftermath of a subtle shock of pleasure. “Then you must call me Jac—”

A sweetened current of air stirred to Illya’s left. “What are you doing?”

Illya flicked a glance down at Gaby. Peering straight ahead, she pressed a pair of oversized sunglasses to her mouth, smearing red over white on the plastic temple. In the time lag between question and answer, she took one earpiece between her teeth and nibbled, delicately.

“Tourists speak to other tourists. As we do now,” Illya murmured, pulling from his pants pocket a folded map of the museum’s many corridors and rooms. “This is natural.”

“Except he is not a tourist,” Gaby replied. “If you remember.” She paused, cocking her head, seemingly in concentrated study of some small aspect of the painting, or perhaps of its gilded frame. “Do you?”

“Art expert.” Napoleon’s roles often spun around a glinting sliver of truth. Illya gathered them like he would flasks of purified water, food rations, a blade and its whetstone, rounds for his Makarov. Tucked into the slack of hours spent on choppy waves and railroad tracks, Illya placed the slivers side by side, above and below. An attempt to see his partner laid out as a whole, bared entirely. Futile, because no matter Illya’s diligence, how he hoarded them, Napoleon remained elusive. “Even more reason to approach. I do not know much about this—” Illya followed a route on the map to the Spanish Cloister. “Sargent.”

“Our _Noah_ is rather fond of him, I think.” Leaning forward, turning it into quite the unnecessary production, she said, “Oh. Look at that.” A poke of her sunglasses indicated the unoccupied space to Illya’s right. “He’s gone.”

Her smile dripping like syrup, sweet and sticking to Illya’s nerves, Gaby turned on a heel. Hypnotized by the pendulum swing of her swept-up hair, a man suited in a tacky plaid pushed away from the brace of a pitted column to follow in her footsteps.

Illya tracked Gaby’s admirer through the cloister before turning his glare on the painting. 

He did not have Napoleon’s eye. Nothing in the bullet casing of Illya’s background allowed for proper judgement of the work. He looked, and was less certain of the light it captured than of the shadows. And his focus, it was diverted not by the woman near the center of the scene, but by one of the men seated behind her, his head thrown back and throat exposed. The prominence of an Adam’s apple suspended in an endless howl. 

What it was that incited such a reaction—Joy breaching ecstasy’s borders? A kind of mourning as music waned?—Illya shook his head. He could not sa—

“Well, Peril, I’d say it’s that and more.”

Shifting, letting his right foot bear the bulk of his weight, Illya’s elbow brushed Napoleon’s sleeve. A hasty breath returned air saturated with Napoleon’s scent: warmer than unfiltered sunlight; brighter, headier, than spices on kaleidoscopic display throughout an open market. Illya drew in another, deeper breath, and kept his gaze pinned to the undulated folds of the dancer’s skirt.

“What is more?”

“Joy or mourning.” Napoleon nodded towards the painting. “You were wondering which applied.”

Illya frowned. “How—“

“I came back to find you muttering to yourself.”

“I do not—“

“It’s alarming, really, how often you do.” Napoleon’s tone was light as the breeze that toyed with the black-tipped flight feathers on the curious nuthatch perched nearby. “All things considered.”

“And you, Cowboy.” Illya intended only to steal a glance but it hooked on the impossible angle of Napoleon’s jaw, on the slight streak of red there, much too dark to be Gaby’s preferred shade. “You have lost new friend,” he said, the words hard, a constriction he had to clear from his throat. “This is record time.”

Napoleon’s grin gathered at one corner. “I wouldn’t have assumed it was friendship she had in mind, but—“

“Foolish of me.” Illya tucked the tremor that had taken hold of his hand into a pocket, curled his fingers around a camera that would soon be no more than glass ground back to sand. “I forget that is a concept foreign to you.”

In Russia, cold snaps were common and cruel. Each occasion was a touch that could not be avoided, but felt through layers of any material, through even the soles of shoes as they slid on paths covered in sloping sheets of ice. Left by his handlers to the mercy of many, many frigid hours, Illya had grown accustomed. Impervious. 

Napoleon’s silence settled in the slender space between them like the deepest snowdrift, and Illya’s memory of Januaries in the cavernous dark, the urgent heat of his training, it fled from him in a shiver.

He shut his eyes. “Cowboy—“

“One of these days,” Gaby interrupted, stepping up to Illya’s side, “I will determine which of you is the lodestone and which the metal. Until then, I suppose I’ll have to continue to sep—”

“No need,” Napoleon said, tightly, holding up a staying hand. “Jacinda Drakos, who claims to be a secretary in the employ of a professor at the SMFA at Tufts, showed a particular interest just now in a Rembrandt on Waverly’s list. As it happens, I have a contact at the school. While I utilize it, Peril, you might set your sights on the man who tailed us from room to room.”   

Illya nodded.

Acknowledging his partner’s consent with a nod of his own, Napoleon unspooled a reel of identifying details that concluded with, “On his right hand, between the thumb and forefinger, is a small tattoo.”

It was not consciously done, but no matter, Illya’s eyes lowered to Napoleon’s hand, lingered on the pearlescent scar that ringed the top center knuckle. How many of the man’s other scars shone like fine jewelry, he wondered, but aloud Illya merely asked, “What of?”

A pregnant pause, exaggerated by shuffling, by the sniffling of a young child. 

Napoleon’s hand pressed into the shelter of his slacks’ pocket, the light from a brass brazier winking off the diamond-sharp corner of an exposed silver cufflink. Illya did not blink, but hastily dragged his stare up, saw that Napoleon watched him with a gaze so brilliant it transmuted Illya’s blood into accelerant, his bone into kindling.

“You’re familiar with the Afrasiab set.”

He had to swallow to do so, but Illya managed a halting, “Yes.”

“The rook.”

A decade could have passed since Illya stepped foot in Samarkand to relieve a band of arms dealers of their munitions cache, but in truth it had been less than two years. He remembered Professor Burjakov fondly enough, and his dig site, with its caravan of camels and the echo of chisel put constantly to hard-packed dirt and stone. So much flitting and chattering among the men, whooping yells when anything at all was unearthed. The chess set, they had found it prior to Illya’s mission. Burjakov had been reluctant to reveal the pieces, but Illya had his glimpse.

He saw also the path Napoleon’s thoughts had taken. “Could be coincidence.”

“I’ll grant you it _could_ be.” Napoleon shrugged. “But…”

Likely it was not, Illya silently agreed. “I will find him.”

Gaby caught Illya’s sleeve. “Clearly,” she said, tracking from Illya’s face to Napoleon’s, “I’ve missed something important. One of you will share with the class. Now.”

Napoleon looked at Illya, one eyebrow arched.

Illya, his mouth pursed, shook his head.

“The rook,” Napoleon did not miss a beat, “is most commonly depicted as—“

“A tower,” Gaby supplied.

“Indeed. However, within certain sets—”

“The Afrasiab.” When Napoleon did not immediately retrieve the thread of his explanation, Illya gestured for him to do so. “Finish.”

“Within that set,” Napoleon said, bemusement dipping into the lines surrounding his smile, “it’s a chariot.”

A considering note, soft in the throat, before Gaby’s sight honed. “So what you’re telling me, in the most cryptic manner possible, is that this man, the one who followed Napoleon and what’s-her-name, odds are he’s the getaway driver.”

“What’s-her-name told me to call her Jack, and yes.” Napoleon canted his head. “Not so cryptic after all.”

“The woman,” Illya refused to say either of her names, “did she have tattoo?”

“Not that I’m aware of, Peril, but there was hardly time for a thorough strip search.”

Gaby brandished her sunglasses, tapping an opaque lens against Napoleon’s chest. “You will find the time later, will you not?”

Napoleon looked at Illya with those eyes like lit lucifer matches. “That depends.”

Heat ignited along the lines of Illya’s cheeks, scorching his skin an unholy red. He knew it was so, as surely as he knew that Gaby’s observation was keen, and that neither fact was his foremost concern. He had once seen ash taken up by hurricane winds, and though he was not yet so reduced that he would scatter, self-preservation bade him to turn away. 

When it came again, Napoleon’s voice was muted. “My evening is spoken for should Illya find the Rook.”

Illya stared at _El Jaleo_ , at the howling man, and repeated his promise. “I will find him.” 

Napoleon stepped back, “I hope you do,” and strode into the crowded courtyard. Vanished between one second and the next.

Gaby sighed. “I walked into the Arctic,” she said quietly, “and within minutes wound up on the sun itself.” Her gaze let loose the empty doorway, lifted up to Illya. “You boys are going to give me whiplash.”

Her face in that moment wore curiosity as a lovely, subtle decoration. Much as Illya appreciated the look of it, for the questions he imagined Gaby would ply him with, were they similar to those that weighed heavy on his own mind, he—But it did not matter. The air in the cloister still swayed with Napoleon’s scent. Illya could not spare breath for speech.

Rather than stand there—silent, a fool in a flat cap—Illya opted to follow Napoleon’s lead.

“Illya—“

He paused mid-step, “This is not the place, Gaby, is not the time,” before moving with speed through the squared corridor to a stairwell painted in a bold blue. 

Appearing to be fascinated by the marble flooring and stamped tiles in turn, Illya searched out right hands, men with a blond and green color scheme, and did not halt his rounds until he entered the Little Salon. A fairy tale made of mirrors and pale roses, candlesticks and harp strings. Presiding over all, a small wooden hummingbird, its beak drenched in gold. A tapestry wove a short story along one wall. On another hung a clock with two faces; the second wore a goblin’s grin. History had wrapped delicate chairs in a blue so pure and so light the fabric might have been water. Illya was tempted, sorely, to see if it might ripple around his touch.

He clenched his fingers into a fist and carefully, carefully, rounded a table covered in porcelain odds and ends.

The late afternoon crowd had abandoned the room, as he should have, but his sight caught on a chaise stretched out in front of a dappled mirror. Illya could not help it, could think only of Napoleon’s dark hair against the burgundy brocade, how he would sprawl across the plush cushion, languid and—“ _Stop this_.”

A rasp like a match drawn along flint, Illya almost did not recognize the voice as belonging to him.

He shook his head, throwing off the invisible silken strands the salon had spun like a web, and rushed from the room. In the doorway’s narrow frame, he met another man with his elbow. “You will pardon me, please.”

The man waved off the words with a blunt right hand. 

Illya’s eyes narrowed fractionally. And then he smiled, small. Predatory. “You enjoy chess?”

****

When Napoleon returned to the safe house, a gilt-edged plate in hand, Illya kept watch by the window. A near perfect mimic of the birch trees beyond his shoulder, he stood tall and still. Arms crossed. His mouth set in a line as tight as any one of the scars slashed into the bark.

The pad of a fingertip or the curve of his own mouth, Napoleon knew he would risk either, would tempt a splinter-sharp bite, if he thought Illya would allow him so close. 

Instead, he extended his glance at the man, shrugging off hours that had stretched taut along the periphery, time that had come unmoored from Illya’s softening silences and Gaby’s quiet laughter, and set the singular Wedgwood on the table to his left. “Help yourselves.”

“You leave us to chase information and come back with—What are those?“ Perched on the ledge of her chair, Gaby pulled the plate closer. “Cookies?” The sample she chose, tugged out from beneath the rest in the pile, covered the dimensions of her palm. A small taste and her eyes went wide. “Oh.”

“Jacinda Drakos, as it turns out, is a lovely woman in her late fifties.” 

Finished with his own, smaller sample, a thin skin of honey clung to Napoleon’s thumb and forefinger. He found one sticky swath with his tongue, and heard a sound: low, leashed, like a wolf half-starved in a den of winter’s choosing. Napoleon waited, but there was no echo, no stirring in advance of movement, and so he pressed on.

“Married to the same man after three decades, Mrs. Drakos has four children, one grandchild, and two Irish wolfhounds. Her hobbies include baking,” he said, gesturing at the geometry that rounded the plate in alternating shades of green and gold, “tinkering with the family Winnebago’s mechanics, and fishing. When she goes to a museum it’s to take in a show at the planetarium.”

Gaby swept a crumb from the table, snagged a second cookie. “If only there were baked goods at every dead end.”

“We’re in agreement on at least one part of that statement, Gaby.”

Illya shifted. “It was not dead end?”

“While we were chatting,” Napoleon said, stripping off his suit jacket, “Mrs. Drakos mentioned a recent fundraiser held in the Library’s Bates Hall. As she tells it, one woman in particular made quite a splash with the male faculty.”

“Let me guess,” Gaby said drily. “What’s-her-name.”

The majority of the furniture at their disposal had seen more years than the bottle of scotch Gaby found in some corner cabinet the afternoon they’d arrived. All three of the wooden chairs at the table were rough with knots, unbalanced. Draping his jacket over the back of one, Napoleon watched the chair rock, watched it right itself on the linoleum floor, as secure as it was ever likely to be. 

He looked up at Gaby, at Illya, and said, “For that evening, at least, she was Dahlia Sinclair.”

“This woman, she has thing for flowers.”

“I noticed that as well, Peril, and though I can’t immediately put my finger on why, it rings a bell.”

“It will come to you.” 

Illya pushed away from the window, but with the same disquiet haste of a reluctant partner, his intent seemed to slip from his grasp. Hesitation took its place for the count of a swaying step, an unlikely pause that filled with a full orchestra of strings, music as distant as Napoleon’s first memory of Ballroom Hall, of frost stitched across the windows enrobing Catharine Palace. When Illya found his footing, prowled closer, the phantom music didn’t pass back into silence, only changed its tune.

“They are made of what, these cookies?”

Napoleon cleared his throat. “Let’s see.” He tested the flavor that remained on his lips. Illya’s focus seized on that slick stretch of skin, his gaze swallowing every syllable Napoleon offered: “Honey, cinnamon, clove, and—“

“Orange juice,” Gaby said, around a mouthful, “and walnuts.”

Long fingers plucked a cookie from the pile’s crown. Where Gaby’s eyes had flared, Illya’s closed, that transparent, midwinter blue shuttered by gold-dusted lashes. His head tipped back, and the angle, slight as it was, lengthened the line of his throat. A smooth canvas, that skin, made for the scrape of teeth and tongue, meant to be marked by a humid color coaxed from blood as paint was drawn from pigment.

Napoleon loosened the knot, smoothed a hand down his tie. “Well?”

“Very good.”

“I’ll be sure to pass your compliments on to Mrs. Drakos.”

Napoleon moved to Illya’s abandoned window, washed in the gloaming’s rich palette. Settled into the silt by the riverbank, a pair of mallards preened, oiling feathers until they shone blade-bright. Queen Anne’s lace gathered over the short grass on the hill, delicate and bending. Removed from the crowd, a solitary full bloom was unbowed, defiant as Illya’s steady hand. Nearer to the house, entwined birch branches writhed with the wind, seemed to strain towards the second story and Napoleon’s cracked bedroom window.

“Did I mention,” he said, drawing back from the glass to focus Illya’s reflection in the pane, “the documents that were liberated from the library’s archival collection the night of the fundraiser?”

Bright and fleeting as a spark thrown from a fire, Illya’s lips twitched into a smile before he exchanged a long-suffering glance with Gaby.

“You might have led with that, you know,” Gaby said.

“What was taken?” Illya asked.

Napoleon pointed. “Have a look in the interior pocket.”

Illya replaced the jacket exactly as he’d found it, then unfolded the sheaf of papers. Looked at the first page, with its embossed seal situated in one corner. His head darted up. “You have been busy, Cowboy.”

Gaby asked, “Do I want to know?”

“Police report.” Illya flipped through the remaining pages. “Always it is maintenance crew they suspect.”

“It’s become quite the criminal trend,” Napoleon rested against the sash while his partners bent over the paperwork, “leaving uniforms in a trash receptacle near the scene. Have you gotten to the—”

“Yes.” Illya continued to catalog the stolen items with the tip of a finger. “They took all of the rest, perhaps, to make the blueprints appear as the least of it.”

“Even so, if the Chessmen can find a buyer, those extraneous documents will net a pretty penny.”

Gaby lifted her head, blinked. “Chessmen?”

“That tattoo plagued me. I made a few calls, and—“

“But,” Gaby said, “you were only gone for—”

“So I was.” Napoleon crossed to the table, dipped a hand into the left pocket of his jacket. “And in that time,” he said, tossing down a smooth card, small in size but of a substantial weight, and a white so pristine it made the ink stand out like stars in an inverted night sky, “I also secured an invitation to the museum’s annual gala.”

Illya scanned the card’s contents. “It is to be held tomorrow evening.”

“Admittedly, the short notice made finding a quality tuxedo an interesting challenge.” 

“Do you have any other goodies in here?” Gaby asked, poking the jacket. “Purloined or otherwise?”

“No, nothing else.” Delivered with utmost sincerity, Napoleon suspected his tone was the cause of Illya’s narrowing eyes. He flashed a grin, lifting the jacket, used a matador’s twist of the wrist to smooth out and show off the material. “I could turn out the pockets, if you’d like.”

Gaby made to speak, but Illya beat her to the decision. “That will not be necessary.” A crease cut the stern center of his brow. “For time being.”

Napoleon’s lips curled. “Say when.”

Illya nodded with affected gravity, then loosed another spark, a slight smile, and handed off the invitation. Gaby brought it up to her nose, sniffed. The arch of her eyebrow wouldn’t have been out of place in a cathedral; not unlike a prayer, she kept her thoughts to herself. As it was there, slender as a stalk and ocellated in shades of brown and bronze, she used the empty vase on the table to prop up the card.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Gaby rose, reduced the number of remaining cookies by two, “I’m for bed.”

“Good night,” Illya said, as she slipped past him, into the stretched shadow of the hall. Light steps on the stairs, his head tipped into the sound. Napoleon watched while Illya waited, waited for her door to shut, for the faint scratch of a needle on vinyl to reach them like a lock turned over. When they returned to Napoleon, his eyes were a wound. “I should not have said it, Cowboy. At the museum, I…I did not—”

“I know.” Napoleon aborted the thought of moving to stand by Illya’s side, the possibility of a glancing kiss between their wrists, of being so near he not only heard the secondhand tick of Illya’s watch, but felt that minute pulse. “I realize you might not think us friends, but—“

Illya shook his head. “Do not feed me words.”

Napoleon stalled. And saw that the wound had been sutured with amusement. “I wouldn’t dare put words in your mouth, Peril.”

Illya hummed in poetic form, with room for interpretation. “We have guest,” he said, abruptly shifting gears from something that resembled play to work. “We will make him feel welcome.”

Unbuttoning his right cuff, Napoleon rolled up the sleeve as Illya watched, the man’s gaze sliding up Napoleon’s forearm, inch by revealed inch. Once it was done, and Illya’s cheekbones were a warm, wine red, Napoleon indicated the doorway with an open hand. 

“After you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw the movie on opening night, and it's taken me this long to believe I might do Napoleon and Illya justice. I hope I have, that you'll continue on with this fic of mine. To that end: Kudos and comments are lifeblood. They're appreciated more than can be conveyed.
> 
> There is one piece of deliberate historical inaccuracy here: The Afrasiab chess set was found later, in 1977. Despite the 1960s timeline, I couldn't resist using it.
> 
> The title is taken from Grace Potter's "Hot to the Touch."


	2. Chapter 2

The bedroom ceiling was a weathered white. It was graphed with cracks, like the pond Illya’s mother favored for its border of tall grass, for the feral cats that took what they needed from the water and refused human hands. On winter-stricken mornings they would go, no matter that skates had become an unsupportable luxury for a long-limbed boy in shoes that strained to contain his feet. Illya did not mind it so much: watching the other children. In his mother tongue first, then he would try another, but always he would keep an accurate count of the fissures that split the frozen surface.

After he had come up from the cellar, after he had stripped to skin and slid between thin sheets, Illya had looked to the ceiling. Adjusting his pillow—paper thin, covered in a cream cotton case embroidered with bluebells—Illya had turned on his right side.

Turned, eventually, to his left.

Finally, on his back, Illya searched for the last crack he had counted and could not remember its number. Or if he had even begun at all.

But Napoleon’s crisp white sleeves, rolled back. Napoleon’s hands and his wrists, the casual revelation of his forearms. These things he could not forget. Illya remembered Napoleon’s voice, rich as any one of Scheherazade’s stories, spilled over two small, simple words.

_After you_.

That is what Napoleon had said, why Illya had led him down skeletal stairs to the cellar, where the Rook was secured to a mud-splattered chair Illya had disentangled from a fishing rod’s line and carried up from the riverbank. 

The initial hour, Illya did not so much as look at his watch. Three quarters of a second hour later the man remained reticent.

Thirty minutes more and Napoleon’s impatience was a prolonged, inaudible inhalation. A slant of lashes like a gun barrel lifted and a dark blue glance at the wood beam ceiling. A foot between the Rook’s knees on the oaken seat. In the suspended second that followed that action the man’s rough denim could not have compelled the fathomless black of Napoleon’s shoe to shine.

For his part, Illya had stepped back. Kept to his corner. Cobwebs unraveled from the beam above him, and he saw it almost as a dream: Napoleon’s pant leg lifting over a double edge blade, over severe straps fastened to defined muscle, his hand firm on the hilt. Napoleon had tested the tip against his thumb—a bead of brutal red glistened, welled up at the pressure point—and at the back of his throat Illya had felt some rough sound. 

The urge to go down on his knees, to outline the tapered sheath with his fingers and then again with his tongue, it had paced the borderline of unbearable. But it was not to be done.

He knew that. 

And because he knew that, because he could not watch Napoleon, not then, Illya had shut his eyes. Recounted the first time he had seen that skin-kissed steel: At some fixed point along the Bosphorus Strait, buried in the pale, gasping throat of a defected biochemist. Within the confines of a salt-scented minute, Napoleon had the blade pulled free for use on Illya’s bindings. The man’s blood like forgotten pomegranate seeds on the ground.

Scrubbing a hand across his face, Illya stood and went to the window, and wondered what Napoleon had seen the night before, from the floor below. It would not have been wrapped in ribbons of soft gold. The ducks would not at that hour have charted an aimless path through the water. Where the bark had split and peeled away, the trees wore gray stripes, like shadows etched on a glacier’s interior wall. Napoleon would not have seen that stripe in evening’s lowered light, would not have thought of cold eyes that slid from cleft to toe and glided back up again. He would not have thought of her.

A pair of pants hastily yanked on, Illya stalked from the room. 

The hallway’s long line was broken by three thresholds. Three sparsely furnished rooms, each with a distinctly different doorknob. Napoleon’s was verdigris over brass. The metal had been cast as a garden bursting with poppies and serpentine stems. Upon seeing it, Napoleon murmured something not meant for his partners’ ears, but Illya heard the name William Morris. _Beautiful_ was not so much a word as it was a sigh. It was in Napoleon’s eyes, and Illya’s, looking at Napoleon. The doorknob lacked a proper lock, and the room it guarded with extreme negligence was the smallest of the three. Napoleon did not seem to mind, made no complaint as he carried his case in to set it down on a narrow bed that had not been designed to hold a living weapon.

Standing tense and still in front of Napoleon’s door, Illya listened. He waited for a sound like sheets shoved back or tugged over; for the slightest noise to suggest that Napoleon was up and seeing to his morning routine.

There was nothing. Silence. 

He could not know if Napoleon had already left, had not gone to—Illya jerked his hand back from the doorknob as though its garden had been infiltrated by wasps, and moved quickly to descend the stairs.

At the kitchen table, with a glass of orange juice thickened by pulp near her elbow, Gaby pushed the remains of a cookie this way and that way over a paper napkin folded deliberately at one corner. When she looked up, her gaze found Illya’s face in sections. “He gave you trouble?”

“ _Nyet_.” Illya took the glass, fitting his fingerprints over hers, though he had no intention of drinking from it. “Cowboy is professional when—“

“I meant our guest, Illya. Surely you haven’t forgotten the man you stashed in the cellar yesterday afternoon?” Gaby tilted her head, so like a little brown-capped bird, Illya thought, cautious but curious, standing at the edge of a pool it could not judge the depth of, and said, “But if you’d prefer to explain what has been going on with—“

Illya cut her off with a shake of his head. “You will make the call? See that he is removed?”

“Certainly,” Gaby said, “but to be sure, who are we talking about now? The Rook or Napoleon?”

“I can speak for myself here,” Napoleon’s voice, from the doorway, “as I’m positive I’ve done nothing to warrant being removed from the premises.”

Foolish. It was foolish to resist the pull to turn around. Worse still to have to accept he only just managed it, staring at the pulp that shrugged like a current against the glass, but Illya could do nothing else. 

“You’re hardly a reliable witness,” Gaby said, and scored a second corner of the napkin. “Since you’re both here, you might as well tell me what you’ve learned.”

“Little,” Illya steadied his gaze on the delicate work of Gaby’s wrist, “and that only because Cowboy is nightmare with knife.”

Paused in her shaping of the napkin into twin points, the alert ears of a wolf or fox, Gaby’s brow lifted high enough to tumble hair into her eyes. “He’s what?”

Napoleon stepped forward, into Illya’s line of sight and a shallow of warm sunlight. A chaos of unlikely curls, the sheen of sweat on pronounced collarbones, low-slung silk sleep pants and a brocade robe rendered useless by its own unknotted belt. This was all Illya could see.

“I assumed after Istanbul Peril wouldn’t be surprised by—“

“Was not surprised,” Illya said, gruffly. “They will try to take paintings tonight. After gala.”

“If so,” Gaby mused, “they’ll need to find a new driver.” 

“They need more than that.” Napoleon drew one manicured nail along the spine of Gaby’s napkin, sharpening the crease to a cutting edge. “It seems they’ve lost track of the man they hired to disarm the security system.”

Gaby shooed Napoleon’s hand away from her creation and shoved another napkin, flat and pristine, in his direction. “Is what’s-her-name in on it?”

“ _Da_ ,” Illya confirmed, through clenched teeth. “She is right-hand to crew’s leader. Rook knew no names. Not real ones.”

“Well, then. What an opportune time for her to have made Napoleon’s acquaintance, no?” The paper creature set down on its four lupine legs, Gaby glanced up. “I presume you have the means to contact her?”

“Yes.” 

Napoleon said this carefully and without lifting his eyes from his own transformed napkin. The same animal as Gaby’s, it was wider across the chest. A little shorter of leg. Its features more clearly defined. After Istanbul, confined to cracked leather seats bolted to the warped floor of a small chartered plane, Napoleon had demonstrated the folding process. Time and again and with different shapes, increasingly intricate, until Gaby learned and it became a game between them. Over the course of a week in Vienna they had made their rooms at the Hotel Bristol into a menagerie to rival the Tiergarten Schönbrunn. Illya could not turn around without the risk of crushing one or more paper animal underfoot. 

Placing his arctic white wolf next to its mate on the table, Napoleon said, “If not for the unreasonable hour, I’d have done so already.”

Illya’s lip drew back over one canine, but his heated reply was banked by Gaby’s frown, the slow pass of her gaze over first Illya, then Napoleon.

“Did either of you sleep?”

Napoleon did not answer, or perhaps his answer was the decade-old coffee maker he retrieved from the cabinet above the stove, was the jar of instant coffee Illya knew Napoleon detested and the dull silver spoon removed from a drawer running wrong on its tracks. He took down two cups of pale, frosted glass, left the sugar where it was, and so perhaps his answer stood in for Illya’s as well.

Gaby rose, brushing crumbs from her coveralls, and went to Napoleon. Put her smaller hand on the back of his. “Don’t drink that,” she said. “Give me a bit to find and hot-wire a van, and I’ll bring back the real stuff. A proper breakfast, too.” 

Napoleon bent to accept the offer with his lips against her forehead. A quiet word delivered skin to skin. It was not a rare exchange of affection, but it settled in Gaby like a down feather curling in a cupped hand. Illya watched the angle of her body alter to hold it close and safe, her smile softening. “You’re welcome,” she said, squeezing Napoleon’s forearm. “Just don’t get used to it.”

On her way out, Gaby stepped up close to Illya’s side. Lifted her chin to present her cheek. “I’m here, if and when.”

Illya looked over the paisley pattern running through her hair, the scarf tied behind one ear, tight enough to make an exacting Soviet sailor proud, and leaned down. She wore honey like lipstick, the scent of her perfume made that much sweeter by her breakfast of leftover cookies. Pressing a kiss to her temple, Illya murmured, “ _Spasibo_.”

All down the hallway she hummed a song Illya did not recognize. The front door opened and eased shut, the wolves left behind in the kitchen unnaturally still.

“Cowboy?”

The marbled muscle of his shoulders and back facing the room, Napoleon pressed both palms to the countertop, a smooth formica coated in the mottled shades of peaches and plums. “Hmm?”

“Was good work you did last night.” Illya’s pulse responded to fill the strange quiet that met his comment. He took a step as if compelled, then another, and another, and when he stopped it was with the vague awareness of having trapped beneath his foot the belt trailing from Napoleon’s robe. “You will tell me why you did not sleep?”

Napoleon laughed. A short sound, contained. “Will I?”

“If you wish to, yes.”

A slivered shaft of sunlight touched the face of Napoleon’s signet ring. He had worn it to the museum, but in the cellar it had been little more than an impression, round as a pulled grenade pin in the pocket of his vest. Napoleon glanced down at the band, glinting gold, a story Illya did not know, and used his thumb to turn an unbroken circle on his smallest finger. “You want to know why I didn’t sleep.”

His hip riding the counter’s line, the curve of his spine stopping to embrace it, Napoleon’s smile was no more and no less than the tip of a knife. “The complicated answer? I got to thinking about Venetian bridges, and how there isn’t a collective noun for—“

Illya growled. “You have reason to lie?”

“What makes you think—“

“If it was because of _her_ ,” Illya bit out, “say it.”

“Her?”

“The woman.”

“Peril,” Napoleon said, “if I’d known those Conan Doyle novels—“

“You do not deny it.”

Eyes too blue to exist outside of a bedroom curtained in the midnight hour lifted to hold Illya’s own. “I will,” Napoleon said, “if you tell me why it matters.”

Tightening his jaw, Illya tried to halt the zoetrope motion of his thoughts, to pull one out that would not betray how he—A noise like chalk put to a blackboard, like a toppled chair inching across uneven cement, managed what Illya’s will could not. He turned his head towards the cellar door, said, “Our guest, he is finally awake.”

Napoleon nodded. “I’ll go.”

Pinned to the floor by Illya’s bare foot, the belt slipped from Napoleon’s robe and fell free. A teal tributary that ended abruptly near the open mouth of the cellar’s door. Illya followed, taking the belt up at its end, and with a shoulder propped against the rough grain of the door jamb, wound the cool silk around his wrist. Listening to the warm and pulsing undertone of Napoleon’s voice, the righting of the chair and the reinforcing of the Rook’s ropes, certain he would not be needed, Illya waited nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who has read this so far, who has left a kudos and comment: Thank you!


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